Beijing Days 9-11

This weekend, I went to the Energy Crossroads China conference. While most of the talks where pretty repetitive for me since I've been to a lot of similar events, I got the chance to meet many of the people on the organizing committee and as well as other participants from China and elsewhere in the world.

Today, there was an optional third day extension of the conference which only about 20 of us participated in (the first two days had 200+ participants). We took a bus to a wind farm outside of Beijing, which was definitely the highlight of the three days for me. I've read and heard a lot about wind power and wind turbines, but I've never actually visited a wind farm, so it was a pretty cool experience for me. This particular wind farm, which is located about 100km northwest of the city center, was built for the Olympics--the Chinese government wanted 20% of Beijing's electricity to come from wind during the Games. Part of the way they accomplished this was by drastically limiting the amount that people were allowed to consume, and part was by increasing capacity. This particular wind farm is not located in the area with the best wind resource--those sites lie in Tibet and other remote areas, and are now being developed--but it runs at a capacity factor of about 20% nonetheless. It consists of 43 1.5MW turbines, with an additional 57 turbines to be brought on line in the next year or so. All of the turbines were manufactured by a Chinese company (except for the inverters), which is a contentious issue in itself--there was a NYT article last week on the Chinese government's protectionist procurement of renewable energy technology. Any way, it was neat for me to see what I've been reading about.

I've moved back to my old hostel, which I'm very happy about. Tonight we have a free BBQ for everyone in the hostel, and I will probably enjoy some more Yanjing beer--it's about $0.75 per 20 oz bottle, so there's always a good excuse to get another.